Jack MacRoary's Fairtrade AdventureEpisode Five

Genre:DramaSwearwords: None.Description:March 4th – Life is boring. Deal with it.

​My dad always says that when you come down to it, life has lots of boring bits in it, whatever you do, so you might as well just get used to it. And try and do a job where even the boring bits are better than doing anything else and being bored. I think that’s what you’d call a philosophy of life. Of course my dad is not a philosopher, he’s a farmer, but sometimes mum says it comes down to the same thing. You can be a philosopher as well as being a farmer because the farmer has to get up early and the philosopher can think any time. In a way it’s a good combination of skills. I told my dad that mum said he was a philosopher and he said ‘aye, right’, and that was it. Mum said that’s because the farmers’ philosophy has to be acceptance. Not scepticism. Or solipsism. (Please note, I don’t know what these things mean but my mum is now taking an Open University degree course because she became empowered after the Independence Referendum, and so she’s always talking about these kind of things.) Luckily you can be a mum and a student and still cook chips, so we let her get on with it. And now there’s no John at home (he’s living with Heather), she has a bit more time on her hands and so she’s using it wisely. As you should.

That’s by the bye. I wish there weren’t any boring bits in life, but then I wish everyone had enough food to live on and no one was in poverty and wishing isn’t reality, so it’s time to deal with the boring bits. Sorry. I’ll make it as painless as I can. But it was boring for us, so it’s probably going to be boring for you.

Becoming a Fairtrade school has rules. Lots of them. Well, not lots but quite a lot. And in case you want to know how your school can become a Fairtrade school, I have to tell you some of the detail. And the way we did it at DrumTumshie.

First of all there are three levels of becoming a Fairtrade school. The first one is pretty easy. It’s called FairAware. All you have to do is make people in the school aware of Fairtrade. That it exists. What it is. How hard can that be? Well, not as easy as you think. We had help from Miss Direction, who managed to make it part of a geography project. We had to do a learner and teacher audit, which means we had to make up some forms with questions which you turn into ‘data’ and can tell everyone just what you all know (and don’t know) about Fairtrade. And you’d be surprised how many of the teachers as well as the pupils at DrumTumshie didn’t have a Scooby about what Fairtrade was.

When we got the data back and were ‘number crunching’ for our audit, Brian said ‘It’s going to be a steep mountain to climb.’ That was unusual for Brian, he doesn’t usually say things like that. He’s less of a metaphorical and more of a literal kind of person. That’s because he’s on a spectrum called the autistic spectrum. It’s not like the political spectrum, so he’s not far right or far left. My dad says he’s ‘far out’ and some less kind people say he’s ‘wired to the moon.’ But Brian is my best friend. And he’s a lot more perceptive than people give him credit for. He just sees things his way. And his way is usually a better way, and most often a funnier way. And as so often is the case, in this instance Brian was right. I thought everyone would easily see that Fairtrade is just common sense, that it’s got to be wrong that some of us live comfortable lives with playstations and mobile phones and sofas and others are having to grub around scrapheaps and trying to live on less than a dollar a day.

But it really wasn’t that easy. Miss Direction could see I was becoming a bit downhearted and she played us a video in class called ‘Fairtrade Matters’. It lasted for about fifteen minutes and afterwards we had a discussion.

After watching the film I wasn’t downhearted any more, but I was quite angry. The people in the film grow tea. I don’t even like tea but that’s not the point. Without Fairtrade they would starve and even with Fairtrade they have very poor lives. If I had been born in Africa instead of in Scotland I could have been one of the kids in the school there. And if I was, I’d hope there was a boy in Scotland like me who was going to help the boy that was me living in poverty in Africa.

Some of the others in my class felt the same. Not everyone, though, and that surprised me. Some people were just plain mean about it. And some just didn’t even care. That shocked me. But what can you do? I’ll tell you more about them later. But the ring-leaders were the twins Jeremy and Jessica White. I’m not embarrassed to name and shame. They deserve it.

Anyway, what we did was form a Fairtrade Group (I told you this before) with Miss Direction and Mr Smith as the appropriate adults (though I’m not sure how appropriate Mr Smith is, given his views on the global economy) and our committee was just five people. Miss Direction said that at least it was a start – and that if we started from such a low base, it would be easier to climb high. Which is the opposite of what Brian said, and I think I trust his judgement more than Miss Direction. But she’s the kind of teacher who thinks they have to keep boosting your confidence, even when you know things are going to be a lot harder than they say. They want to get the best out of you, to maximise your potential and all that. And they do that by telling you that you can do this and that – even if you think you can’t. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

They say things like ‘follow your dream’ but I think that’s stupid. It all depends on what your dream is. My dream is to be a potato farmer and I stand a good chance of achieving that, because my dad is a farmer, so I have land and a job to go to when I leave school. I just have to convince him to diversify into potatoes. And let’s face it, whatever happens in the world, people will still want to eat chips and crisps.

But if I wanted to be an astronaut it would be harder to follow my dream. Probably impossible. I could spend years following that dream and never making it come true. All because someone told me that everyone can achieve anything. It’s just not true. Mum agrees with me. She says sometimes people have to learn to be happy with what they have, not keep hoping for more. Of course, sometimes you have to fight to make things better and to get what you want, but false hope is just that, FALSE.

And we need to live in a world where people are more practical and dream less and face up to realities more. That’s what I think. And part of the reality is that we are all very lucky in the lives we live in Scotland compared to the ones in the Third World. Or the ‘developing’ world as they call it now. It’s hard to see the ‘development’ a lot of the time, though. And of course there are some people living in poverty in Scotland and going to food banks and some children are being abused and all sorts – but on the whole it’s still a much better standard of life than in the underdeveloped countries. Of course, the family you come from helps a lot. Having a good and loving family in an underdeveloped country may be better than having a rubbish one in Scotland, but when it comes down to economic reality, you have to face facts and see how much better our lives are here. And when you do face that reality, you shouldn’t just shrug your shoulders and say that’s how the world is. The world is only like that because we made it that way and we allow it to continue that way.

So when Miss Direction was going on about how we could do anything etc, I asked her if she knew the names of the 60 people in the world who own as much wealth as half the whole population of the world. She said she didn’t and why did I want to know? I said because I wanted to write them all letters asking them to ‘adopt’ a continent and commit to making life better for the people there.

She laughed and said it was an idea worthy of Brian. Which made me even more proud I’d had it.

I said that she’d said we should all do things and could do anything and that wasn’t it just like a sort of Davos conference but easier and costing less to arrange. All it would cost is the 60 stamps to post out to the people and I’m sure if I saved up I could get the money to do that in a month or so. Have you seen the price of stamps these days?

She said that while it was great that I was ‘so enthusiastic’ and ‘dreaming so big’, I should start from a smaller base and work my way up. But I couldn’t see why I shouldn’t go straight to the top, which, after all, is where the problem is. The problem isn’t that there isn’t enough money or food in the world. The problem is that the people with the most money hang onto it and that people let food go to waste and keep the prices high to stop other people being able to afford it.

Mr Smith said ‘that’s capitalism’, as if that explained anything.

‘It’s criminal,’ I said.

And then we had a long lecture about the realities of economics from Mr Smith, but he could see that Miss Direction didn’t totally agree with him and he did admit that there are a lot of greedy people out there (for food and money) and that perhaps the system wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. So then he put the moves on us.

‘That’s for your generation to sort out,’ he said. ‘You have to take the lead.’

I asked how I could take the lead when no one would give me the addresses of the people who could solve all the problems.

And then Mr Smith and Miss Direction were saved by the bell. We had to go back to our classes. But don’t think I’m going to let this drop.

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About the Author

Jack MacRoary, also known locally as the Bard of DrumTumshie, comes from the small farming community of TattyBogle, which he has singlehandedly put on the map through his fame. After bursting onto the Scottish literary cultural scene in August 2012, when he appeared at the inaugural Edinburgh eBook Festival, Jack now attends DrumTumshie Academy.

During his brief but eventful literary career so far, Jack has been a blogger, providing an insightful commentary on rural life and Scots culture; a short story writer; and most recently a political commentator through his McSerial contributions to the McStorytellers website.

The Complete TattyBogle, Jack's first “real book” published by McStorytellers in 2015, brings together in a handy compendium all of his musings, commentaries and stories to date.